Firebird Conference 2014 took place on 24-25 October in Prague, Czech Republic, Clarion Congress Hotel. Some facts about the Firebird Conference 2014: there were 110 attendees, 18 speakers, 23 interesting presentations and, of course, invaluable conversations between sessions.

Headliners of Firebird Conference were core developers of Firebird Project: Dmitry Yemanov and Vlad Khorsun, they presented the latest news about Firebird and plans for future development.

Special guests at Firebird Conference 2014 were Jim Starkey (original architect of InterBase, Falcon (MySQL), NuoDB and more) and Ann Harrison, with two very interesting presentations about high performance threading development and orphan records in Firebird.

Firebird driver developers, Jiri Cincura and Mark Rotteveel, spoke about Firebird.NET and Java. The second talk of Mark's was about Java and jOOq was also supported by Lucas Eder, original creator of jOOq.

The audience was great, many sessions turned into valuable conversations, generating tricky questions and comprehensive answers.

At the URL below you can download all the presentations that were made at the conference:

Firebird Project is pleased to announce that «Firebird 2.5 Language Reference» in Russian language is released. It is available on Firebird SQL Documentation page.

Why it is only in Russian and how to get it in English? The answer is the following: Moscow Exchange, one of the biggest Firebird users in the world, and IBSurgeon (tools and service for Firebird) have sponsored documentation development in Russian. Several Russian-speaking core developers of Firebird Project participated in documentation creation to ensure its quality.

The next step is extending this documentation to cover Firebird 3 new features: authors and editors are already working on it. However, the resulted documentation for Firebird 3 will be also in Russian.

In order to translate Firebird documentation into English, Firebird Project needs additional funds.

We need US$7000 to translate almost 500 pages of Firebird documentation into English using professional translation service, which will ensure the quality of translation.

So, if you would like to have Firebird 2.5 and 3.0 Language Reference in English in the first quarter of 2015, please help Firebird Project now with your donations (please use PayPal option): http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/donate/

Firebird Conference 2014 is ready to start in Prague, Czech Republic. 2 days of talks and conversations with Firebird core developers and leading Firebird companies, and a meeting point for all Firebird users!

— Jiri, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation?

— If you're an .NET developer working with Firebird you need to catch up with all the changes that happened during a year. There's a lot of improvements and you might actually benefit from some of these pretty well. Also might be a good recap of some new features in Firebird.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— How clean and transparent is in outside. I'm really looking for proper SMP support. Also as a provider writer the external stored procedures/triggers/... are really interesting. Although there's probably a lot of work to do (and it's not moving further much).

— Roman, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation?

— Red Database is a fork of the great DMBS Firebird. We base of the latest versions and add new features. We are going to talk about our experience of Red Database (Firebird) usage, about our heavy loaded installations as well as about new features like:

security enhancements (i.e. DDL permissions migrated to Firebird)

full text search

engine level replication (StandBy mode)

Also it's would be interested to see how we organize a development and QA processes.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— I like great portability of Firebird and good support of SQL standards. It makes it compact, portable and powerful DBMS ready for any purposes. Regarding Firebird 3 my favourite feature are shared cache and java stored procedures.

— Pavel, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation?

— IBPhoenix provides information, support and development services to Firebird users for fourteen years, so we've got a lot of experience with wide range of problems that these users encounter. We're creative and always look for new ways how to solve their problems more effectively, and where appropriate we make tools that help us make the job done. In my presentation I'll share my experience with using monitoring tables and trace & audit services to solve various problems. I'll focus equally on what they could be good for and to methods and tools that worked best for me.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favorite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— Firebird is simple (to use and manage) yet very powerful and flexible engine with great support (drivers, libraries, applications etc.) and vibrant community. It's not good for everything, but works great for most cases. I'll always go with Firebird as my first choice, and look for other solutions only in rare cases when Firebird is not good enough. About Firebird 3, it's hard to pick one favorite feature/improvement as every one of them is important and contributes IMHO equally to make v3 an awesome release.

— Jonathan, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation?

— I will be giving an overview of our database replication solutions and presenting the new features developed over the last year or so, including support for iOS and Android devices using Delphi's Firemonkey platform. I plan to show a real-world application we built this year for synchronizing SQLite databases on Android devices with a central Firebird database. I will also give an overview of our new database backup / mirroring solution called LiveMirror. The talk will assume familiarity with the Delphi environment and language, but it should be of interest to anyone considering implementing database replication or in need of a solution for securing their data through continuous replication (for failover or load-balancing purposes).

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— I love Firebird's simplicity and ease of use. I think the project has found a great balance in that it is quite feature-completeness while still avoiding unnecessary bloat and remaining dead-simple to administer. Simple to install, reliable, and more than enough features for most uses. I do appreciate the new features that are being added, but I think the focus on avoiding bloat in the process is a good thing. As for new features of Firebird 3, I'm really looking forward to windowing functions, which I expect to use a lot! I frequently find myself writing fairly complex queries in order to extract data that could be gotten easier and faster with windowing functions. The other features sound great too, but that's probably the one that matters most to me!

— Carlos, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your talk?

— My talk about Data Auditing logs is based in a solution that I have been using in the last 6 years, in my own ERP. It was created because from time to time I got contacted by customers saying that some information simply disappeared from the database, or got modified without nobody editing it, suggesting that the software had some bug <g>. With auditing logs, it became really easy to show/prove to customer what really happened, allowing you to keep a history of everything that was done inside the DB. The other talk is about Numerics in Firebird. Due to the several different datatypes available for storing numbers in Firebird, each one with different characteristics/behaviors, it is not rare that developers get lost about its differences and what would be the best type for a specific requirement. This talk will try to answer those questions, as well show some tips, tricks and side-effects that sometimes are unknown by the developer, showing also the actual rules used in the math involving numeric/decimal types.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— I use Firebird since its first release, and what I really enjoy about it is the fact that it is small, easy to install and configure, very stable, has low maintenance and, of course, it is totally free! Firebird 3 is long awaited for its improvements related to extracting all the potential of SMP machines, even when shared cache is being used. Of course, this feature is a must in the currently world where SMP machines became the standard configuration for servers. But FB 3 also brings very nice features, and I really enjoy the fact that now we can encrypt the database file and the wired communication, and the wire protocol was improved allowing better performance in high latency networks (internet).

— Mark, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation/talk?

— I have two talks scheduled. My first talk is about the current state of development of Jaybird, and the changes implemented (and to be implemented) for Jaybird 3.0. I think this is interesting for people who use Jaybird and want to know more about the upcoming changes. My second talk is about using Hibernate and jOOQ to query a Firebird database from Java without having to deal with the low-level JDBC operations. Hibernate is a ORM mapper, while jOOQ is — besides a (light-weight) ORM mapper — a Domain Specific Language (DSL) library for building queries with compile time checks. Both are also useful to bridge dialect differences between various databases.

Although introductory, I think this is interesting for application developers, even when their target platform isn't Java.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? And what is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— I think the key thing about Firebird is its simplicity and small footprint, install it and you are — basically — good to go. I think my favorite new feature in Firebird 3 are the window functions. They provide much needed extensions for analytical queries.

— Paul, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentations?

— Well, I've always been fascinated by trying to measure firebird performance. This year I've spent quite a bit of time working on a test harness that produces consistent output, and above all, a database to store and analyse the data produced by the tests. The results are quite surprising and to me at least, very interesting. I'm certainly enjoying putting the presentation together and hopefully it will be enjoyable for people to sit through.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird?

— The pace of development. I know we seem to be behind schedule on v3 but I'm barely up to speed with the new features that have been added in v2.n. A lot of the things that used to be difficult back in the day (I've been using Firebird since IB4) are so easy now. The way text blobs can be converted to and from strings, the way sql statements can be constructed on the fly in stored procedures, the fact that domains can now be used consistently in SPs — these are just a few of the things that make database development easier. And of course there are monitoring tables, db and txn triggers. And loads more stuff besides.

— What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— It is too early to say. There is so much new stuff in v3 that it will take me a while to get on top of it all. Probably best to ask me in about two years time :)